


keep reaching out (i’ll keep coming back)

by notorious



Category: Legacies (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, and ric is an incompetent father, legacies: quarantine edition, this is soft, which is nothing new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27178139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: ric locks down the school and as a result lizzie finds herself stuck with hope.
Relationships: Hope Mikaelson/Lizzie Saltzman
Comments: 6
Kudos: 168





	keep reaching out (i’ll keep coming back)

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in march and never did anything with it so here y’all go. i do not edit anything i write. i am very tired. i miss hope mikaelson. thank you for your time. title from light on by maggie rogers.

Alaric Saltzman warned not a single one of his students before he put the Salvatore School on lockdown.

Quarantined every last vampire, witch, and werewolf.

Instituted a no-students-out-of-their-rooms policy for anything other than use of the facilities.

Three daily meals to be delivered to dorm room doors by dining carts spelled by Emma to drive themselves.

All school-wide events postponed indefinitely.

Any outstanding academic projects, papers, and presentations will be allotted a week’s extension. Classwork, according to the headmaster, does not disappear simply because there is a global pandemic.

Lizzie was in Hope’s dorm to accuse her of cheating at badminton in phys-ed when Ric had Emma seal all doors with a spell.

And thus — stuck.

Together.

It’s been six hours.

“Stop staring.”

“I wasn’t,” Hope tries to say, but she had been, and the attempt dies on her tongue. She musters a bashful smile instead. “Sorry. You’re just—”

“Stunning, I know.” Lizzie doesn’t even look up from her book. “Pretty enough to put Grace Kelly to shame, I know that, too. I smile and hearts ache. I  _ know _ .”

“You’re  _ distracting _ ,” Hope clarifies.

It’s been forty minutes since she parked herself at her desk but Hope hasn’t gotten a single word of her Transitional Biology essay down on paper. Hasn’t even consulted her outline. All she’s managed to work on is a mindless sketch of Lizzie’s hands cradling that copy of  _ Little Women  _ in the margin of her notebook.

“Not my fault you can’t keep your eyes to yourself.”

Fair, Hope thinks. And maddening.

“It’s easier to draw you when I can look at you.”

She should not have given Lizzie that much. The siphon is going to take that and  _ run _ .

They’re supposed to be studying. Working. Writing. Whatever.

Certainly aren’t supposed to be double-checking the seal on the door and settling down extra close atop Hope’s bed. Lizzie definitely isn’t supposed to be peeling off her sweater and stretching out on her back, hands tucked beneath her head. And Hope isn’t sure she should be thinking that Lizzie is basically fine wine on two legs: rich and whole, expensive, elegant, and frustratingly delicious.

They’ve always been shit at doing what they’re supposed to be doing around each other.

With a dull pencil and a sketch pad Hope begins to put Lizzie on paper. Slow curves ease into exquisite bone structure, graphite spills shadow into the hollow of her throat, lithe muscle gives shape to long arms and willowy legs. Drawing Lizzie throws Hope into autopilot; her eyes wash over skin, her pencil scratches across paper, and her heart thunders with each rise and fall of Lizzie’s breath. The lines of her sketch are soft, almost blurred, and Hope reckons when she’s done she’ll have quite an idea of what Lizzie’d look like if she glowed.

“Here,” Lizzie mutters once they’ve been silent for too long, long enough to leave the air crackling and the atmosphere charged. “How’s this?” The siphon drops her hands and when she’s through the buttons of her blouse have been undone and the shirt falls open over her chest and Hope’s breath catches in her throat because it really isn’t fair how soft Lizzie looks.

How soft and how strong.

Perhaps an oxymoron, she thinks, but Lizzie is always breaking rules like that.

“God,” Hope mutters, pencil stalling on paper, biting at her smile. “Absolutely ridiculous that you just  _ look _ like that.”

Lizzie goes red in the face and Hope hears her heart speed up.

Three hours later Hope’s asleep across the foot of her bed with the sketchbook cradled against her chest with Lizzie at her back when someone comes pounding at the door.

“Heaven on earth,” Hope grumbles, dragging herself up and away from Lizzie’s warmth, and onto her feet. “Come to set me free?” she calls out in jest, resting a shoulder against the door.

“Is Lizzie with you?” Dr. Saltzman. “We can’t find her.”

Suddenly Lizzie’s awake, too, and on her feet, and at Hope’s side before the door, and decidedly unhappy with her father’s line of questioning if the scowl she’s wearing is anything to go by.

“ _ Nine _ hours, Dad,” she stars, huffing. “It really took you nine hours to figure out where I was. Unbelievable.”

“Oh, sweetheart—” 

“Save it,” Lizzie tells him, voice like ice and light as snowfall as she lays a hand on the door and mutters an incantation.

Dr. Saltzman goes silent. So, too, does the distant rumble of muted conversation from nearby rooms.

“Really?” Hope turns to her, arms across her chest, smirking. “A silencing spell? What are we, five?”

“Screw this virus,” Lizzie grumbles, heading back to the bed, “and screw him, too. He’s never cared.”

At twelve hours it’s Hope who starts to go stir crazy. Lizzie is uncharacteristically calm.

It surprises them both, really, and Hope doesn’t like that she’s the one with a screw loose over the ordeal of being confined to a small space. She’s used to being the calm one, everyone’s rock, and she’s not quite sure how to anchor herself to reality under current circumstances.

“Four cases confirmed in Mystic Falls,” she reads aloud from her phone. “Thirty-four suspected.”

She’s pacing, and it’s starting to drive Lizzie mad.

“Calm down,” the siphon says. “Getting worked up won’t make this any easier.”

“That’s rich coming from you,” Hope says without thinking, eyes glued to her phone.

“Excuse me?”

Shit, Hope thinks. “That’s not what I meant,” she says.

An hour later Lizzie still won’t talk to her. 

“I’m  _ sorry _ ,” Hope insists, tugging at Lizzie’s arm.

They’re shoulder-to-shoulder on Hope’s bed, Lizzie’s reading again, and Hope won’t quit trying to bug a reaction out of her. She’ll take anything at this point.

The silencing spell is still in full-effect and Hope no longer cares to ask how long it has left.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Hope says. “I wasn’t thinking. I was being an asshole.”

She’s not sure what else she can say just yet, so she plays the next best card she’s got.

She hunkers down at Lizzie’s side, curls up by her legs, sneaks her hand over the blonde’s arm, closes her eyes, and nuzzles against Lizzie’s hip. And then she plays pretend.

When twenty minutes go by and she’s kept her breathing slow and steady, when she’s convincingly asleep, she feels Lizzie shift. She hears the book close and hears a suppressed sigh.

“You  _ are _ an asshole,” Lizzie whispers.

And then there’s a hand on her face, fingertips stroking her jaw, a thumb brushing a cheekbone, and Hope feels warm again.

“But I forgive you.”

Hope blinks one eye open and grins. “Took you long enough.”

“Oh, you  _ jackass _ .” 

Sometimes she just can’t help herself.


End file.
